The Google Algorithm and How To Work With It and Not Against It

Can working with the Google Algorithm be challenging? First, I’d like to start by saying I’ve listened in on many webinars and read many articles dealing with Google’s algorithm update.

In particular, Google’s “Panda” update which took place last January and February.

A lot of sites were good sites with quality content and good quality inbound links and they were punished and dropped in the rankings because of the new Google Algorithm.

And some sites with content and links that weren’t as good were raised up in the search engine rankings.
This caused a lot of complaining from people as if Google owed them a living.

People were wondering why they lost their place in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

They wanted to know why people were moved ahead of them who didn’t have the quality of inbound links and content for it to be justified.

I’ve heard a lot of SEO’s talk about different techniques and strategies they’re going to be using and advising clients to use as well to try and stay ahead of these different updates that Google makes to it’s algorithm.

I think they’re in for a losing battle.
How To Stay In the Game With Google

First of all, we know Google has a tremendous amount of resources at their disposal.

They have hundreds (maybe thousands) of brilliant engineers from software to programming who specialize in search.

People who do this almost 24 hours a day and make sure that the Google search experience cannot be beaten.

Google’s algorithm is getting smarter all of the time. Their intent is to try to duplicate human intelligence (aka Artificial Intelligence).
In my opinion, the best thing to do is make sure you have Quality and Unique content that’s well written and researched.

It’s best to have content that’s about a subject that you’re passionate about. And you want to write from your real life experiences and knowledge.

You know the ones, those things that you’ve accomplished and things that you’ve actually gone through in life.

If you’re one of those sites that you feel has been unfairly punished, you can go back through your content to see if you can improve on the quality.

It could be something that you didn’t see before so if you go back and review it and you see that the quality needs improvement, then by all means do so.

Sticking To the Basics With Google and The Algorithm

• Of course some of the basic rules of SEO (search engine optimization) will still hold. You still want to have quality inbound links coming into your pages with the proper anchor texts in that link being relevant to the page it’s pointing to.

• Your on page optimization is still important for things like your title bar, meta description, headlines and keywords, but what Google is looking for is mostly off page factors.
There are many, many off page factors that they’re looking at, such as how a visitor responds when they click onto your site and when they leave your site. The Google algorithm is capable of evaluating this data.

There are many factors that we can’t know and Google’s not going to tell you all of the factors in their algorithm that they’re looking for.

Many of these off page factors are beyond your control. The only way you can control your off page factors in any way is to give your visitor the best possible experience when they arrive at your pages.

• Another caveat is to make sure that when you outsource your content to be very careful.

When you’re outsourcing and you’re not paying very much for an article you have to be very diligent and make sure that what you receive is original and unique content.

You don’t want to just put content on your site without due diligence to make sure it’s not duplicate content and that it’s well written and well researched.
You can use Copyscape.com to run the headlines through an article to see how many times that article shows up as duplicate content on the web.

Finally ...

Google’s algorithm is not a hard thing to work with. Again, just make sure you produce great quality, original content at all times and you won’t have any issues.

This is a game of longevity and the ones who last are the ones who fly straight and keep their SEO in line with the Google Algorithm and TOS (Terms of Service).